Summary: Trouble shooting lifes trails

This sermon was developed for the Army Community. It contains phraseology that may not be understood by the general civilian population.

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Today is Super Bowl Sunday.

I’m going to need a few volunteers. Now only volunteer if you like football.

Who is going to win the game? What’s going to be the point spread?

How many of you are going to have some friends over and watch the game, you know have a Super Bowl Party?

How many of you would be really happy if your CQ called and said you had to come in right a way and the half-time show just ended.

Or how many of you would be happy if you were to suddenly have a black out and you couldn’t finish watching the game?

These are all things that I suspect that none of us would like to have happen to us, but in the grand scheme of things are they real tragedies? Maybe to some of our volunteers, they would be a serious bummer, but a tragedy? I don’t think so. Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

As we all know life is full of problems and trials. Some are a nuisance such as a power outage during the Super Bowl, some are nagging like an a cold that just seems to go on forever and ever and some are much more serious, such as family problems, finical problems and problems at work. Trials such as these can be over whelming to the person or family in the middle of it. Sometimes there just seems to be no way out, no hope.

Today I would like to talk about a three step process that will help us face the trials of life with courage and reassurance.

Please turn with me to James chapter 1 verse 2. Today I will be reading from the New King James Version.

I. Step One – Patience (v. 2-4)

First and foremost James tells us to be joyful when we face the trials of life. This seems like a really weird thing to do. Who in their right mind would want to be happy when they are faced with the prospect of being deployed away from their family for a long period of time, or who would be happy about not having enough money to pay their bill for the month. And yet James says to be happy. If we were in such a situation what would we have to be happy about?

James goes on to say that we should be happy because the trail produces patience. But why should we be happy about having patience produced in us? Why can we just get patience instantly, why do we have to go through a trail? We have to go trails to develop patience so that we can become perfect and complete as children of God lacking nothing.

Think about it. Anything in life that is worth doing requires a trail of some sort. When you learned to walk did you just stand up and start walking? No of course not. First you had to learn how to crawl and then stand up and then take your first step, and in doing all of that you had to fall down a lot and most likely cry.

Or perhaps when you were older how many of you could just pick up a musical instrument a play well it without any lesions or experimenting at all? I don’t think we have anyone here like that. To learn to play an instrument well you have to practice, practice and practice some more. For sure it is a trail, a trail for the child learning and a trial for the parent trying to get the child to practice after the first week when the kid has lost interest and realizes that musical ability takes real work to develop.

Patience is the first step in trouble shooting the trails of life. We all go through trials. Each trail develops a certain amount of patience whether you want it or not. The patience developed can then carry forward to the next trail that you face. The key is using the patience that you have developed in the past to help move you through the next trail.

I’m sure that most of you have heard this illustration before, but it really illustrates the virtue of patience. Thomas Elision was not an instant success with the electric light bulb. He had to experiment for months and months before he found the right combination of elements to produce a reasonably long lasting electric light bulb. As I recall he had to try over 1000 times before he was successful. Now that’s patients.